etnobofin

I only took one photo while I was at Les Deux Alpes, and this is it – the view from my hotel window on Friday afternoon. It was the best weather of my stay: on Saturday and Sunday the clouds rolled in, making skiing well, not impossible, but certainly difficult with 20-metre visibility.

As is traditional when I head to the mountains, I made a video. The 2010 edition is fairly modest compared with the meisterwerks of 2007 (Slovenia and Switzerland). But at the end you do get to see a bunch of clueless skiers traversing a fresh avalanche on Monday afternoon…

The avalanche came down over one of the blue runs, and must have been very recent – soon after we crossed the avalanche, the ski patrol arrived with rescue dogs to check whether anyone had been buried… as the weather warms up, more of these snowslides are likely across the Alps, and the ski patrols are on alert.

The other drama of the holiday was getting caught in the nationwide strike on SNCF on Tuesday. It took me 10 hours to get back to Paris instead of 6, and I stood all the way from Lyon to Paris in the restaurant car of a TGV. However all the passengers were very tolerant of the crowding and the young train crews (it seems it’s the new employees who are left to provide the service minimum during strikes) were having a lot of fun running a TGV all by themselves.

Arriving back in Paris, spring had well-and-truly established itself. The city seemed to have a smell again, and there were birds singing in the still-nude trees on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Arriving back at my apartment, the gardien was clearing the mailboxes as I walked in the front door.

“Bonjour monsieur vous allez bien? Ca commence à faire beau maintenant, hein?”

“Effectivement.”

There aren’t any leaves on the trees yet, but something’s in the air. This week it got to 18 degrees in parts of Paris, and the café terraces are filling with people who still look like they don’t quite know what to do with the glorious weather. I took this photo the other day on the way to a business meeting…

However winter is not quite over in the etnobofin household: I am off to the Alps for a long weekend sliding around on a mountain. So in the interim, I’ll leave you with a taste of one of the pinnacles of French culture – Pigloo:

Walking the upper Arolla Valley in January

View north from the black run

Mont Collon dominates the scenery

Grimentz – the centre of the old village

Zinal, the most south-eastern francophone village in Switzerland

Looking east over the Val d’Anniviers

Well, according to Time Magazine (who named me Person of the Year, by the way), we are all content producers now.

So in the spirit of this exciting young interactive century, here’s a video of a weekend in Slovenia.

Skiing and filming at the same time is pretty darn difficult, I’m surprised that there was any usable footage at the end of the weekend. The quality isn’t fantastic – I was filming with my trusty Canon Ixus 55, (ie, not really a video camera) and then Windows Movie Maker refuses to bounce down completed videos at 30fps (the optimum for Youtube). But I hope somebody enjoys the results.

The soundtrack is Srce od Kristala by Slovenian singer Anžej Dežan, who was the country’s entrant in Eurovision last year. The song is a little different from what you’d normally hear on this blog, but believe me, after a few days in a place like Slovenia, all that trashy Europop starts to make sense – it’s all a question of context.

Slovenia is a drop-dead gorgeous country, and if you’d never been to Europe before and had to pick one nation to visit, you could do a lot worse than wind up here – it’s got all the essential things that make continental Europe so cool – Adriatic coast, Alps, vineyards, turnip fields and a cute little capital city called Ljubljana. Everyone is either friendly or at least accommodating, most people speak English, and you can eat as much horse as you like.

I’m off down south for a few days to get my annual snow fix, so there won’t be any posts for the next week or so…

In the meantime, I’ve sourced some early Kenny Wheeler solos ! In 1966, British drummers Ronnie Stephenson and Kenny Clare recorded the Drum Spectacular album in London. (Rare on vinyl and not yet available on CD). The big band playing behind the drummers is all British guys – among them Kenny Baker (tp), Kenny Wheeler (tp), Tubby Hayes (ts) and Ronnie Scott (ts). And on South Rampart Street Parade and Topsy, the 8 bar trumpet solos are by none other than… Kenny Wheeler !

They’re pretty nice big band charts too, in a Buddy Rich sort of way. Righto, I’m off to clean my goggles and buy sunscreen.

Kenny Clare & Ronnie Stephenson Big Band – South Rampart Street Parade
Kenny Clare & Ronnie Stephenson Big Band – Dual Carriageway
Kenny Clare & Ronnie Stephenson Big Band – Topsy
From Drum Spectacular: Columbia-EMI [OOP]